I have a dear, dear friend who lives in New York City, whom I talk to every Sunday night, without fail (unless one of us is in, oh, say, Vienna, as he was a couple weekends ago, lucky dog). We’ve known each other for 25 years, and at several points during this long escapade of ours, we’ve compared neuroses. One of my friend’s other friends once described him as being someone who would prefer to know he was in hell than not know where he was, and this level of comfort with the abuse that life brings has been his strength and his downfall, all at once. “Life strikes”, we called it at the time, and it certainly does.
Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be much, does it? One missed night of sleep, an unplanned business trip – anything that upsets that delicate balance that we’ve created to get us through the morass of chores that seem to accumulate around any adult family.
For me, recently, it’s been a couple things. My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, has been feeling a little poorly lately, and her father, He Who Must Be Indulged, has been having health issues of his own. They both need some extra help – my help, either directly or indirectly. And thus the delicate balance is upset. Evenings are swallowed up with chores, weekends with unplanned trips to central Massachusetts. And then, of course, the Celtics – my beloved Celtics – are in the NBA Finals (can you hear the capital “F”?).
So the guitar whimpers in the corner, begging to be played. My notebook and thesaurus gather dust on the counter. I open my mouth to practice and discover that I’ve forgotten my own lyrics. It’s kind of foreign, this distance from the music. And I’ll have to admit, it’s not killing me the way it ought to be. I’m missing the spotlight, but I’m not missing the part where I beat myself up about not booking myself. I kinda like the quiet rhythm of coming home from work, having a meal, reading a book, going to sleep. The ambition of youth is a wonderful thing, and I ain’t so young anymore.
But this, too, will pass. I’m still hitting the open mikes, and I still adore that charge of performing for you lovely folks. I’ll be recording an album this summer (I hope), and I’m certain to lose patience with the confines of my living room soon enough. My wife and her father will be feeling better. And we’ll be rockin’ again before you know it.